Computing devices for personal use have become more and more ubiquitous in the last few decades. This trend of increasingly widespread use was further boosted in recent years with the advent of mobile platforms, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), hand-held computers, and computerized mobile phones running a full-fledged operating system, commonly known as “smartphones”. These devices typically have general-purpose processors, memory and storage that provide users with computing power nearly on par with that of desktop computers. Additional prevalent features include connectivity to various communications networks and other devices, e.g., Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), cellular networks, Near Field Communication (NFC), etc., and one or more types of sensors, such as cameras, microphones, accelerometers, Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, and the like.
Many mobile computing devices include a touch-sensitive display (also known as a “touch screen”) with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) serving as the main form of user interaction. The user interacts with the GUI primarily through finger contacts and gestures on the touch-sensitive display. Thus, operating the mobile device and its different functionalities can prove difficult or even impossible when one or both of the user's hands are occupied or when the user is unable to look at the display screen, whether for intermittent periods or at all. This situation commonly occurs when the user is driving a vehicle, for example. In a 2014 interview, Larry Page, Google's CEO and co-founder, addressed this issue: “We still feel computers are pretty bad. You're messing around, you're scrolling on your touchscreen phone. You're in a car and it's bouncy and it doesn't really work”. In this scenario it is evident that some form of voice control is desirable. In recent years, with the introduction of the “Virtual Assistant” such as Siri™, Cortana™ and Google Now™, a significant stride has been made towards this reality as voice recognition improved significantly.
As humans are creatures of habit, and as many computing devices share common features and functionalities between them, usage of computing devices can exhibit great regularity and repetitive patterns, such that the same operations or sequences of operations are frequently performed by a user or a plurality of users.